


WILD LIFE

by sidnihoudini



Category: Good Charlotte, Hedley
Genre: Established Relationship, Groundhog Day, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-05-25 07:27:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6185842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people are just chemicals that are meant to be together. He and Benji have always been two people doomed to live in one another’s stratosphere - even now, he’s sure of that. They were atoms that must have been around one another during the big boom; everything leading them back to one another is just science.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. scratch scratches

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this one is a little weird.
> 
> I wrote this story in 2013, for Nanowrimo. It's completely finished, I'm just editing and posting it in chunks. I've been meaning to post this story for literally 3 years, but all of a sudden I can't write anything else until this is out of my drafts folder.
> 
> If you're coming from twincest land, the Jacob in this story is [this](http://cdn.hollywoodpq.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/29.jpg) [dum dum](https://41.media.tumblr.com/36abdbe58d835a00fc1969060494b129/tumblr_na462oyFmz1th7j6ko1_500.jpg). For some reason I've been writing him with Benji for like 10 years or something stupid like that. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf9rfQ0073E), too.
> 
> Also [these are the pictures](http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1504153.1383333006!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_635/miley-cyrus-benji-madden.jpg) referenced in the first part.

Jacob’s picking through a pile of tour laundry when the phone rings.

“Hello,” He answers, cradling the iPhone between his shoulder and ear as he stands in a puddle of neon colored garments. All things he hasn’t worn in years and years; fuzzy gym headbands and Urban Outfitters t-shirts that practically reek of 2007 but make him too nostalgic to simply _throw away._

On the other end of the line, a voice suddenly blurts, “Oh my god.”

“Phoebe?” He asks, frowning as he sets a pair of ripped jeans shorts to the side. Aside from her voice, sudden and apathetic, he can hear the soft buzz of her co-workers in the background. “What’s up?”

She stalls for a second - television hosts are really good at doing that - before cracking. With a sharp inhale, she blurts out, “Benji is fucking Miley Cyrus.”

“Benji?” Jacob parrots dumbly, as his fingers disengage and he drops the article of clothing he was holding a moment ago. All of a sudden his stomach is weightless, dipping down into his toes before it snaps back up into his throat. He blinks dumbly, tasting it as his mouth opens and closes, and stares at the painting hung over his bed.

All of a sudden he’s nauseous. Like, really super nauseous. He feels like he did before he surprised himself by throwing up mid-hike a few weeks ago.

“Yeah,” Phoebe says softly, sighing. “And Miley Cyrus. She dressed up like Lil Kim. Benji just… went as himself, I guess.”

Jacob sits down on the end of the bed. His blood pressure is beginning to spike, suddenly he can feel his heart beating in his ears. He can’t help the way he starts to laugh hysterically. Miley Cyrus. And Benji.

“Benji and Miley Cyrus,” He finds himself saying out loud, openly stunned. “Hannah Montana.”

His ex is fucking a dirty pop star.

“I know, dude,” Phoebe says, sounding sympathetic.

 _Fuck_ , Jacob thinks a little hysterically. He stands up and then sits back down again. The man he was engaged to less than a year ago is now fucking Miley Cyrus. America’s perpetual posterchild. A tongue showing, butt-hungry shorts wearing menace to society.

“There are like… paparazzi photos of them on TMZ. My segment producer found them,” Phoebe finally explains. She pauses to clear her throat awkwardly, then adds, “I can forward them to you.”

Jacob cringes.

“Please don’t,” He manages, closing his eyes. He tilts his head back and sighs.

There are seriously so many people who are going to make fun of him for this.

~

“ _Miley Cyrus_ , dude,” Dave cackles two hours later, over a plate of nachos and a fresh tap beer. He plops a big spoonful of fresh guac on his plate, still laughing as he adds, “And we thought there was nowhere left to go after Paris.”

Without thinking about it, Jacob aims a drink coaster at Dave’s throat, and replies, “Funny. Ha, ha.”

“VERY funny,” Dave agrees, grinning. He knocks the coaster away as he reaches for the sour cream. “Do you think they’re actually fucking?”

Frowning, Jacob reaches for his own half empty beer. The corners of his lips curl down even further when he realizes he only has a few sips left. He also doesn’t want to think about the logistics of Benji and Miley fucking one another. They’re the same height and have a similar taste for dick.

“Her mouth is just so _big_ man, like,” Dave continues, tripping over his words a little.

Jacob drains the remains of his beer, and replies, “She’s just got a lot of… teeth.”

He is kind of Team Miley. With or without Benji’s sudden strange involvement in her life.

“So do you, man,” Dave agrees amicably, tucking back into his plate of food. “I can’t believe Phoebe’s the one who told you.”

Signalling for the waitress, Jacob pushes his empty beer glass towards the edge of the table, and frowns. “She was nice about it.”

“Six degrees of Miley,” Dave says, which is neither here nor there. He shakes his head and bites into a double stacked nacho.

Jacob fingers the edge of the nacho tray, but doesn’t eat any of it. He’s felt vaguely seasick since Phoebe called him with the news.

“Tell me your worst breakup story,” He says miserably, reaching for Dave’s beer instead.

Grinning like a gigantic dick, Dave makes a face and shrugs. Jacob watches Dave’s wedding ring glint in the low light of the dive bar. It catches every glimmer of light, glowing and endlessly capturing Jacob’s drunken, sad attention.

“Well buddy, it definitely doesn’t compare to this,” Dave finally says, managing to get half of the sentence out before he’s cackling again and taking endless delight in Jacob’s new misery.

Jacob finds himself smiling a little at that despite everything. 

Offering up a middle finger across the table, he says, “You’re an asshole.”

~

A few hours later Jacob is considerably intoxicated.

He’s drunk enough to opt into walking home instead of getting a cab or a bus or the Skytrain. He’s drunk enough to stagger out onto the sidewalk and bum a cigarette from Dave before he bikes off in the opposite direction, back towards his wife and their warm little condo.

Instead of finding a wife or a cab, Jacob picks up a stick and wanders down the mostly deserted sidewalk. He sways back and forth on his feet a little as he lets the stick rattle against a chainlink fence, then a brick wall, line of trees, and haphazard wooden construction panel.

He and Benji were together for longer than he had been with his highschool girlfriend. Other than the two of them, Jacob’s dating repertoire extends to a series of one-night stands and tour flings. The high school girlfriend broke up with him when he turned eighteen, and he met Benji ten months later. By twenty, they were in a serious relationship together.

Three months ago, Jacob celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday alone with friends of his on the east side of Vancouver. Eight months ago, he and Benji split up for the very last time. The break-up happened on a night he barely remembers celebrating, set against the midnight purple sky of Los Angeles.

Now that was a long stretch of time in his life, as he spent the entirety of his early twenties following Benji from airport to office to studio to show. At the time there hadn’t been much for a moderately popular Canadian musician to do in America. The US hadn’t been interested in his band, so he’d made do with Benji’s unwavering company.

He cringes when he thinks about all that now. Cringes so hard, he accidentally snaps his stick.

“Fuck that,” He reminds himself sharply, as he tries to shake the feeling off. 

In retribution to the shitty thoughts now floating through his mind, Jacob throws his half stick into the rain glittered gutter, then takes a sharp step to the right. He can feel himself staggering back and forth in that ‘slightly too drunk, definitely getting drunker as I walk’ type of way.

And fuck Benji. It wasn’t Jacob’s fault Benji couldn’t write a decent song to save his life, and it wasn’t Jacob’s fault that _his_ band was signing a contract for three more albums as Benji’s was tanking. His successes had nothing to do with Benji’s failures, and even now, Jacob just wishes they could have realized that.

At the next crosswalk, he comes to a staggering stop. Jacob lines his toes up with the curb as a sports car blows through a yellow light, the wet, cold peel of tire rubber echoing through the midnight air. Frowning, Jacob gets his iPhone out of his pocket, and concentrates on trying to navigate to Safari.

His hand is still dirty from the stick he was holding two blocks ago, something he only realizes when his finger streaks dirt across the screen.

“Fuck,” He says to himself, swaying and squinting with one eye as he tries to focus on the small screen.

In front of him, the pedestrian walk signal changes from ‘okay’ to ‘caution’ to ‘do not walk’ as Jacob tries to get his keyboard to stay open long enough to tap in a search keyword.

Concentration entirely funnelled into the screen of his iPhone, he manages to tap _miley cyrus and benji madden_ into the search prompt. His stomach begins to crawl with nervousness despite the blanket of alcohol surrounding him as the Google Search results page loads.

One second later and there they are: the pictures he didn’t have enough balls to look at sober.

The photos aren’t that incriminating, but they still hit him like a punch to the gut. His head immediately swims with tension as he clenches his jaw and taps the first photo, heart rate doubling when he sees Benji’s stupid face for the first time in months. He doesn’t have a chance to focus on anything else in the photo before he feels his arm jerk sharply to the right. Jacob’s alcohol addled brain leaves him unable to comprehend what’s happening until all he’s looking at is the empty palm of his own dirty hand.

Without thinking, he jerks his head up just in time to see some guy with his hood pulled down low over his face, running away with Jacob’s phone still lit up and clutched firmly in one hand. Despite the surplus of alcohol in his system, Jacob’s adrenaline kicks in, and all of a sudden he’s moving, grabbing the guy by the back of one elbow before he can get away.

“Hey,” He snaps, jerking the guy back a step as they both stumble into one another.

The guy ignores him, trying to lunge forward again and knock them both off-balance enough to get away. In the process of doing this, his hood falls away from his face just enough for Jacob to see the well worn patch of picked at skin and scabs that wrap around his jaw.

“Come on buddy, just give it back,” Jacob tries, grip still solid around the guy’s elbow. He gives him another tug backwards.

If Jacob were any less drunk, he would probably just let the guy take it to pawn for drug money, and call it a day. But he isn’t. He isn’t sober, he’s righteously drunk, and he’s already lost something else today. 

Without thinking, Jacob grabs the guy by the waist. There is no hesitation in the guy’s frame as he twists around and throws a punch at Jacob’s face in retaliation.

“What the fuck,” Jacob manages to blurt, before he blindly punches back.

He is now fully engaged in a fist fight with someone he, in a moment of clarity, would normally realize is just a homeless meth addict.

Somewhere in the back of his brain, Jacob hears his phone clatter to the wet concrete a few feet away from where they’re fighting, but here, in this moment, he watches as the guy’s fist comes back around in a dead aim for his face. Jacob manages to get one good return swing in, connecting it to the guy’s cheekbone, before the alcohol wins and he takes a step in the wrong direction. 

In that split second, the guy lands a swift punch against Jacob’s temple, and sends him down faster than a stone sinking in the open sea.

The world turns syrupy. The air suddenly crawls with slow motion as the side of Jacob’s head hits the ground first, before his hip, his shoulder, and finally his elbow.

Somewhere in-between impact and realization, Jacob has a clear moment of thought that tells him he needs to roll over, off of his back if this is how tonight ends. He manages to get onto one side, and curls in on himself as he watches the homeless guy scurry backwards a few feet, crouching to pick up what Jacob now presumes is his phone from the gutter.

Tears dripping down his temple, Jacob closes his eyes, and pulls both knees up to his stomach. 

Pain begins to bloom from the side of his face. It radiates everywhere, from the line of his jaw, up into his temple, and across his forehead. There’s a tense moment of absolute silence as he tries to take a hazy inventory of his pain.

The sound of heavy footsteps coming towards him is a surprise, until a boot connects, hard, against the back of his head.

That’s all he remembers - the sticky sound of rubber on wet concrete - before he blacks out, body warm but gone.


	2. fire starts with matches

The sound of a ringing phone is what brings him back around.

Groaning, Jacob palms one closed eye, and then stretches his other arm out, unthinking of his stolen iPhone.

But instead of wet concrete, his seeking fingers trail across soft, well-worn cotton.

His eyes pop open in surprise.

The desolate East Vancouver street corner he vaguely remembers last being on now looks like somebody’s bedroom. It isn’t his bedroom, even though parts of it look familiar. He frowns and focuses on the edge of the dresser set directly across from the bed.

“Whaaaat the fuck,” Jacob whispers to himself, voice rough. 

Blinking a few times, Jacob pushes himself up onto one elbow, and looks around, trying to find the source of the ringing. It stops a few moments later.

Confused and disoriented, Jacob sits up, letting both legs dangle off the edge of the bed. He’s mostly naked, which isn’t new. Thankfully he doesn’t have any cuts or bruises from his recent scuffle. His hands aren’t even scratched up from when he fell against the concrete.

Jacob frowns and touches his fingers to his bottom lip. The skin there isn’t split, and it doesn’t feel swollen either. It definitely doesn’t seem like he got suckerpunched by some fuckhead a few hours ago. Something bizarre is going on. Maybe he’s still unconscious and dreaming all of this while his physical self snores against the curb.

In fact, it takes another few moments for him to realize that anything is wrong at all. When he notices that the tattoo sleeves on both his arms are no longer there he practically falls out of bed, catching himself against the nightstand. The tattoos aren’t removed or damaged - they’re just gone, like the ropes of roses and thorns never existed in the first place.

Adrenaline floods through his system as he takes inventory of the rest of his tattoos, and realizes that they’re gone too.

He’s bare. Just stretches of young, tanned, freckled skin.

The familiar ink on his knees, torso, and chest, just gone.

Jacob is trying to look at the back of his right thigh when the bedroom door pops open and Benji hurries through. He has a black, raggedy looking knapsack thrown over one of his shoulders, a beanie on his head, and a back-up hoodie balled up in one arm.

“Hey,” He says, sounding out of breath.

Suddenly unable to speak at all, Jacob’s mouth drops open and then closes again, stunned into silence for the first time in his adult life as Benji hurries around the bedroom. He yanks a dresser drawer open and grabs a couple of spare t-shirts before turning his attention back on Jacob, still standing awkwardly against the edge of the bed.

“I forgot shirts,” Benji explains easily, a crooked grin on his pierced lips. He touches Jacob’s bare hip and leans up to kiss his mouth.

Jacob’s heart flops wildly around inside of his chest. He can feel it thudding in his eyeballs.

“Ah,” Is what he manages to say, mouth open and useless as Benji laughs and turns around.

On his way out, he grabs something from the top of the dresser, but Jacob is too stunned to see what.

“Bye again,” Benji grins, sharp and cheeky over one shoulder before he closes the bedroom door behind himself.

Riddled with shock and adrenaline, Jacob shakes his head and tries to regulate his breathing. He touches his own hand. He’s real. He’s definitely totally real, he can still feel his heart beating in a very human way. He can hear his pulse thumping behind his ears, possibly as a sign of a early heart attack.

Benji seemed real, too. As real as anyone else made out of skin and bone and ink could. Jacob may not have had the opportunity for an extended look, but Benji is also someone he would recognize anywhere. 

He could identify Benji piece by piece; he didn’t need much.

Disoriented, Jacob sits back down at the edge of the bed, and holds his head in his hands.

~

Jacob met Benji when he was still an over enthusiastic teenager with baby fat, an alright voice, and no high school diploma.

At the time Benji was riding out the final waves of success. He had been going through the last steps to becoming a caricature of himself before that inevitable final plunge into total obscurity.

Despite all of that, Jacob was enamoured from the start.

The first time Jacob met Benji, it was backstage at a radio event in Toronto. Jacob was fulfilling his contractual obligation for one final round of Idol promotion, and Benji was there to promote Good Charlotte’s third album. There had only been a quick handshake passed between them before they were both pulled in opposite directions by opposing handlers.

What Jacob remembers most about that afternoon - even now, over ten years later - is the moment he saw Benji’s face for the first time.

Benji was wearing a bandana pulled up around his chin, and had the last dregs of black makeup smeared haphazardly around his eyes. There were small pink scars left from recently removed piercings in his cheek and nose, but one last piece of silver jewelery looped through his bottom lip still - like he wanted to change, but he wanted to stay the same, too.

It was the image of a man in transition right as Jacob had only been beginning.

But the moment passed, Benji’s eyes flickered away, and Jacob offered a crooked grin but nothing else. And that was just it. The exact moment when they pulled one another’s grenade pin out.

Everything clicked into gear in that moment, and there was no way to stop the universe from what it started.

~

Jacob creeps out of what he’s now assuming is Benji’s bedroom in his underwear.

Ideally, he hopes he can find his cell phone somewhere in plain view. He decides to search the living room first, because apparently in this strange alternate universe he’s a weirdo who doesn’t sleep with his iPhone within reach.

He’s on his hands and knees between the couch and coffee table when the house phone rings again. It’s loud and obnoxious and just on this side of 2001. Startling at the sudden noise, Jacob bashes the meaty part of his upper arm against the edge of the coffee table and swears. It takes another minute of genuine effort before he can reach the corded telephone sitting on the other side of the couch.

“Yeah,” Jacob answers without thinking, admittedly a little out of breath.

Alternative universe him is not really in shape. He’s a little concerned he’s going to get stuck between the couch and coffee table.

There’s a crackle of static on the line before a familiar voice replies, “Hey is Benj still up there or what?”

“What?” Jacob blurts, immediately feeling stupid for his clumsy response. He grimaces and closes his eyes, trying to swallow against the suddenly nervous tension in his throat as asks, “Joel?”

The confusion in Joel’s tone is pretty obvious as he slowly replies, “Yes?”

“Sorry,” Jacob apologizes awkwardly - the last time he saw or spoke to Joel, they’d been screaming at one another as Jacob tried to get back down the driveway in his rental car. The memory sends a sad, sharp pain through his gut. “I just woke up, Benji left already.”

Jacob is about to elaborate on the sudden coming and going of Benji Madden, despite feeling clotheslined at the shockingly fresh memory of Joel yelling at him, when Joel swears and says, “Ugh, finally, there he is. Run, Benj, fuck!”

As Jacob opens his mouth to say something else - funny, he hopes - the line clicks and goes dead.

“Fuck,” He breathes, leaning his head back against the couch. He lets the phone fall against his chest as his heart rate returns to normal.

Maybe someone roofied him while he was with Dave at the bar. Maybe the guy that punched him accidentally broke his brain.

Jacob doesn’t move from that defeated position until the phone starts beeping, a string of long, agitating tones that finally prompt him to get up and put the handset back on its cradle. Who the fuck even has a home phone line anymore, anyway? What the fuck is this, his grandmother’s house in the 90s?

Shaking his head, Jacob picks up an Xbox controller from beside the phone cradle, and looks at it strangely before setting it back down again.

Despite all of the outdated technology he’s suddenly surrounded by, this is still very much Benji’s living room. Dark furniture, debatable decorations, and a wall length bookcase of alphabetized movies and books. He can’t help but smile a little when he looks down at the bottom shelf, full of old VHS tapes and stacks of CDs Benji had always been too stubborn to throw out.

He remembers the text his sister sent him once, when he and Benji were first dating. _Alphabetized DVDs? He must be your soulmate._

Jacob’s stomach turns sour at the memory, but the suddenly intimate feeling of being _home_ seeps through his skin regardless. He’s never been in this room before, but for some reason, it’s more familiar than a lot of other things have been lately. The way he feels right now reminds him of coming home after months and months of touring.

Sighing, Jacob sinks back down into the couch, stomach tight with a potent mixture of homesick and anxiety. Benji seemed happy to see him before he left. Did Jacob’s bender last night somehow conclude with some kind of grand reunification?

He’s debating the possibility of this when his eyes fall to the TV Guide sitting at the edge of the coffee table.

A hardcopy, legit, bound TV Guide. That is… weird, Jacob decides, frowning.

Leaning forward, Jacob pulls the book towards him. It’s definitely new. It doesn’t even look like it’s been opened all the way yet, despite Benji’s stupid “don’t bend the spine” rule.

Besides being unopened, it’s also dated April 2002.

“Alright,” Jacob says to nobody in particular, carefully setting the guide back down on the coffee table. “That… that’s fine.”

Standing up, Jacob decides to head back into the bedroom. It’s becoming blisteringly obvious that he isn’t about to find his iPhone here.

~

Twenty minutes later, Jacob is trying to shake off the signs of intimacy that surround him.

There’s still a half finished mug of coffee beside of the bed, not yet separated from the cream and likely leftover from his morning. At the foot of the bed is a pair of crumped socks discarded on the carpet, one a tiny ball and the other stretched to within an inch of its life. On the dresser that sits on the side of the bed Jacob woke up on there’s another landline phone, and a framed picture of Jacob and Joel.

This home is clearly lived in, and Jacob tries not to let himself drown in the familiarity of it all.

Instead, he stands in front of the dresser, fighting against the urge to dig through every drawer, and picks up the phone again. He dials his final lifeline, the only number he knows off the top of his head. It’s his own 604 area code phone number; the same one he’s had since he first got a flip phone at 18.

He dials and waits. Tries not to look at the photograph staring back at him. Listens to the pre-recorded message that clicks onto the line, telling him that the number is not in service and to get fucked.

Jacob hangs up and immediately tries the same number again.

“Fuck,” He swears loudly, hanging up the phone with more force than necessary when he gets the same recording.

Frustrated, Jacob yanks open the top drawer of the dresser, and begins to rummage around. Half of the drawer is underwear - his underwear, which is something he doesn’t want to think about right now - and the other half is condoms and assorted paperwork, mostly receipts. Frowning, Jacob leaves the drawer open and turns around.

TV. TV will help him.

Walking back through to the living room, Jacob picks the remote up off of the coffee table, and presses the power button.

Comedy Network fills the slightly outdated looking screen with a repeat episode of South Park. Jacob can’t remember the LA channel line-up anymore, so he scans through the channels one by one until he finds CNN. For some reason this remote doesn’t have any kind of digital menu button.

The news anchor is talking about video game violence, which means it’s just another day in America. Frowning, he flips through another few channels until he hits the weather network.

On the bottom right hand corner of the screen, below the current temperature and above the time, it says today’s date is April 17, 2002.


	3. life in plastic

There’s a photo of Jacob, Benji and Joel on the fridge.

It’s a classic twin sandwich: they’re all laughing and Jacob is in the middle with an arm slung over each of their shoulders. 

They look like _children_ , bright-eyed and happy, with Benji in black, Joel in white, and Jacob in a terrifying amount of denim.

Box of cereal in hand, Jacob frowns, and fists a palm full of Cheerios into his mouth. It’s strange to see himself standing so young beside Benji when they didn’t even meet until years after this photo would have been taken. That aside, Jacob tries to place the photo’s background. It looks like an outdoor music festival but he has no memory of the actual event. Warped Tour, most likely.

The polaroid isn’t wrinkled or beginning to yellow. It looks like it was taken yesterday.

Tucking the cereal box under one elbow, Jacob tugs the photo out from behind its magnet, and holds it up to the light. He finds himself smiling a little despite himself. If nothing else, this picture is photographic proof that they were happy once, even if it was a million years ago.

It’s a relief to see he wasn’t just imagining it all those years.

~

Jacob is rummaging through the drawers in the living room when the house phone rings again.

His immediate reaction is not to answer it. Maybe he was supposed to go home after Benji left on tour, maybe it’s Benji’s private number and he has no place picking it up in the first place. He debates with himself for so long that the ringing stops altogether.

There’s a short pause, Jacob’s hand braced over the open drawer he’s rummaging through, before the ringing starts again.

Frowning, Jacob pushes away from the drawer and stretches over the coffee table to pick the handset up. The ring, no answer, ring again thing is what his mom used to do when she was at work and he was home alone and not supposed to pick the phone up. And, well, old habits die hard.

“Hello?” Jacob answers, one hand going to the back of his head.

Benji’s in the middle of laughing at something on the other end of the line, but cuts himself off when he hears Jacob answer.

He’s still giggling despite himself as he cracks up again and says, “Hi.”

In the flash of a second, Jacob’s chest is running at about a million degrees. He can feel his pulse thumping in his ears. He hasn’t heard Benji’s voice sound like that in a very, very long time. It’s warm, content. Happy to hear Jacob’s in return.

“Hey,” Jacob replies. For some reason his voice sounds soft, and he doesn’t mean for it to be. Does he sound like he’s about to cry? All of a sudden he’s horrified at himself. Jacob clears his throat and manages a stronger sounding, “Hi.”

He doesn’t realize his eyes are closed until all he can see is Benji, standing right there in front of him. It’s the Benji that he used to know - the one he fell in love with for the first time - before Benji had the chance to turn stupid with longing for something he missed his chance at having a long time ago.

Benji would never be the icon he once strived to be, and near the end of their relationship, it killed him.

“So our bus broke down before we even like… got out of the neighborhood,” Benji laughs, cutting himself off as Joel says something in the background and then giggles. Benji’s shadow, always. Soulmates in every way that mattered. “I guess now we’re going to the airport. And let me tell you, as band treasurer, Paul is not happy.”

Despite the pit growing in his stomach, Jacob finds himself laughing, too.

Even in the confusion and whirlwind of whatever has happened in the last twenty four hours, it’s still Benji that he’s talking to now. For a moment Jacob is so high on the concept that he can’t do anything other than simply go along with it. Even if this is just an elaborate daydream, he’s going to take advantage of it.

When Benji makes a joke, no matter how bad it is, he’s going to laugh. And then he’s going to drown in the warmth of it all.

“The airport,” Jacob repeats without meaning to. Forehead wrinkling, he pivots to look over at the wall of photos and records hung in a cluster over the back of the couch. Paul is the band treasurer?...

Good Charlotte haven’t bought their own plane tickets since…

“Yeah babe,” Benji says, interrupting Jacob’s thoughts. “Boston is a long way from California without a van.”

Boston is a long way from California with a van, but that’s beside the point. Jacob’s heart pinches at the casual term of endearment Benji throws his way. His face floods with heat; his sister used to give him so much shit for getting babed.

“I’m just being an idiot,” Jacob tries to recover, looking up at the ceiling. “What did I do last night? Was I drunk?”

Benji sounds distracted as he answers, “Last night? No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“No reason,” Jacob lies, grimacing. He tugs at the lobe of his ear and manages to add, “I guess I just slept for longer than I thought.”

Jacob hears a boarding announcement start in the background as Benji laughs and then sighs, “Alright, well. I think we’re starting to board so I gotta go. Call me tonight, okay? We should be at the hotel by five. Right, Joel? Joel?! Joel! Five, right? Six? Okay, six.”

“Yeah,” Jacob replies, faint smile tugging the corner of his lips up. “After six, I got it. Tell Joel I said hi.”

All of a sudden there’s a loud crash, and then Jacob hears instant yelling and bitching. Benji muffles his cellphone to reply yell back at somebody; it’s so fuzzy, pressed into his shirt, that Jacob can’t actually tell what he’s saying. Jacob listens anyways.

“Our gear just fell over in the middle of the aisle, now I really gotta go,” Benji finally comes back long enough to explain. He’s still laughing a little, a bit out of breath from excitement.

Jacob can pretty easily imagine their gear in a pile in the middle of the floor: GC stickers everywhere, with Benji’s dumb white spray paint stencils separating his guitars from the rest.

“Hey, just,” He says, words stumbling out before he fully knows what he wants to say. “Wait a second, Benji.”

There’s a moment’s pause before Benji replies, curious, “What’s up?”

“I just, I love you a lot,” Jacob answers, immediately cringing at himself yet unable to say it any other way.

If this is all just a glitch in the Matrix and he only gets to talk to Benji under these circumstances once, he wants to make sure it counts.

Warm, soft silence settles between them, like the airport Benji is standing in has just frozen in time - just for a moment, long enough for this one second to hang still.

“I love you too, man,” Benji replies, voice soft against the chaotic background noise. “And I’ll see you soon, I promise.”

Jacob, suddenly feeling as suckerpunched as he did that night on the curb, pulses a smile and manages to reply, “Okay. Bye, Benji.”

~

The rumors are true:

Jacob saw Inception four times in theatres, once in IMAX, and a thousand times during bus lounge movie nights with Dave.

While he may or may not have been stoned for the majority viewing, if there’s one thing Jacob remembers - other than the fact that Leo is still as dreamy as he ever was - it’s that in order to break away from a dream, you must first wake up.

Just wake up. It couldn’t be that hard, right?

Feeling particularly clever, Jacob goes back to bed a few hours later. This dream world is nice and all - it’s great his skin isn’t starting to wrinkle, and that his back tooth is no longer cracked and Benji still loves him - but he knows that the longer he stays here, the more he’ll want to, permanently.

Jacob has had his heart broken this way already. The sooner he can do it now, the smaller the crack and resulting damage will be. He’s almost sure of it. He just hopes Dave will still take him out for drinks after finding out what happened.

After an hour of laying in bed, Jacob manages to doze off for no more than thirty minutes.

When he wakes up again he’s disoriented anyways. Dim grey light is fading in through the curtains from outside.

Jacob looks down at the blanket weighed over his body, and realizes that he’s still in the same bed he fell asleep in.

“Fuck,” He grumbles, voice sleep rough and tired.

He’s still here.

By some kind of black magic, he didn’t wake up hungover in a ditch somewhere on the east side of Vancouver, bleary-eyed and sick.

He’s still here.

He didn’t have some kind of romantic notion inspired by a traumatic head injury to catch a standby flight from YVR to LAX and apologize to Benji.

He’s here. In Benji’s West Hollywood subsidized apartment that he lived in three years before Jacob ever met him. Benji’s apartment, where a single gold record from the first Good Charlotte album hangs over the back of the couch, otherwise surrounded by family photos and cheap art prints. Benji’s apartment, where everything indicates Jacob is eleven years in the past.

Jacob rolls over, feels a little seasick for a minute, and then closes his eyes again.

~

When he and Benji first started dating, Good Charlotte were in the middle of promoting their fourth album.

Benji was dealing with instability, uncertainty, and an eventual GC Greatest Hits compilation. He DJ’ed whatever Hollywood clubs would book him, and produced on the side with Joel and John Feldmann. Feldy was one of the last guys who could consistently get Benji’s fanboy gears grinding.

Years later, Jacob still remembers that Benji fondly. After losing the black makeup and following velvet goth wardrobe, Benji seemed happy with himself, however momentary the feeling would be.

And for one, inexplicable moment in time, Jacob really thought that they could make it together.

Fuck, had it ever been complicated at first. Jacob was already going through a divorce at twenty - the death echo of a particularly bad kneejerk reaction he’d had in marrying his high school girlfriend at eighteen. Even though he loved Tammy very much, a separation was imminent from the start. And, once Benji started coming around more, it hadn’t made sense to wait any longer than he already had.

Jacob didn’t even have the balls to tell Benji about Tammy until they’d already been together for a month. 

When he finally admitted to the tan lines on his left hand he already was drunk, and they were doing tequila shots at a dumpy bar off Melrose - Tiki Ti’s. Back then Benji, and by association Joel, had only recently been exposed to the sheer amount of money flowing through their particularly incestuous faction of Hollywood.

Around the same time, both Benji and Joel quickly became obsessed with taking some of that wealth for themselves. They made plans to open a clothing store, a record label, and a home studio. TMZ frequently found out where they were eating. Benji decided to date Paris Hilton. It was a strange moment in time.

Regardless, the same night that Jacob admitted to his failed marriage, Benji told Jacob everything he wanted to achieve. All of the plans upon plans upon plans upon plans he was cultivating. Benji wanted to sink roots into the loose dirt of the entertainment industry, and grow where he was planted.

Jacob was immediately intoxicated with Benji’s ideas and big dreams. He spent that summer in LA recording the second Hedley album, dicking around poolside while label producers scratched their heads, looked at his lyrics, and tried to match them up with sales projections.

The idea of simply _living in the city of dreams_ seemed like a pipe dream to Jacob, at best.

Now, ten years later, things are different. Most of the time, Jacob wishes that they weren’t.

~

Two lonely nights later, Jacob is in the middle of making himself a one-man dinner.

He’s been able to find his way around the kitchen pretty easily. Benji has always kept his various pots and pans in the cupboard closest to the oven, and the spices are in a kitchen island door. For all intents and purposes, Jacob operates as though he belongs here.

It isn’t until he’s sitting down with his constant companion, TV, that he realizes… maybe he does.

~

Benji is back later that night, long after the sky goes dark and prime time has come and gone.

The distinct sound of the front lock unlocking echoes through the otherwise quiet apartment before the door swings open. Jacob is already in bed, haphazardly flipping through the rumpled AP Magazine he found on the floor. He misses his 2016 electronics.

“You’re still up,” Benji greets, voice quiet, soft, as he appears in the dark bedroom doorway.

For one suspended moment, Jacob doesn’t know how to respond.

Back when they were happy, he would have smiled big, showing the crooked gap teeth at either side of his mouth. Nearer the end of their run together, he would have pretended that Benji said nothing at all, silently flipping through the magazine’s pages instead. Benji would have inevitably crawled into bed beside him with his laptop already open, and iPhone well within reach.

Tonight he’s at a bit of a loss.

“Yeah,” He manages, freezing like a deer in headlights at the soft expression on Benji’s young face.

Benji doesn’t seem to realize anything is amiss. He smiles and enters the room, dropping his bag against the wall with one hand as the other reaches up to unzip his hoodie. Even from here, he looks that familiar brand of road weary, tired like he hasn’t slept since the show. His eyes are hooded and smudged with old makeup.

“We managed to get standby tickets for cheap,” He explains, voice rough from singing. He tugs off his hoodie and drops it onto the chair at the foot of the bed, the bright white letters that spell out MADE disappearing into the black confines of the cut fabric. Next he reaches up to tug off his beanie. Jacob’s stomach flips over when chin length, box black hair flops out over Benji’s forehead. “Billy got stuck there with the crew ‘til tomorrow. He was kinda pissed, but there were only three seats available.”

Nodding, Jacob swallows thickly, and rolls the magazine into an anxiety tube for lack of anything else to do.

He can’t help but take a constant inventory of Benji. He’s just so much younger than Jacob ever remembers knowing him. The smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes aren’t there yet, and the small tattoos that line up with the arches of his eyebrows aren’t inked. It’s like looking at an old photograph that hasn’t had the chance to fade.

Benji tugs his t-shirt up over the back of his head, hands criss-crossing as his head pops out and Jacob realizes Benji is missing more than just cheap gold teeth and sun drawn freckles. Almost all of the tattoos on his torso and arms are gone, too. The only thing that remains is his sleeve, the skeleton led funeral procession an odd comfort in the dead of the night.

It’s also entirely bizarre to see so much empty skin stretched across Benji’s throat and below his ears.

“You alright?” Benji asks finally, as his mouth twitches up into a curious smile. He runs one hand through his hair and then reaches for the heavy looking Hot Topic buckle on his belt, where he rests his black painted fingernails, chipped and dull.

Jacob forces a smile - he isn’t sure if he’s alright, he’s stuck in a parallel universe where it seems as though he’s deeply unemployed and at least a decade younger - and then nods.

“Just tired I guess,” He explains, voice soft. Benji has resumed stripping, and is currently pushing his black Dickies down over his hips.

Next he braces one hand against the end of the bed to tug his checkered socks off, one and then the other.

“Me too. We slept at the airport last night,” Benji replies, adjusting the elastic waistband of his underwear as he walks around to his side of the bed. “Except Joel, because he went to Jeannie’s. Dumb.”

Jacob’s sense memory goes into overdrive as Benji flips the covers back and then stands in front of his night table. He unsnaps the spiked bracelets from around his wrists, and lets them drop on top of a paperback book that he’s probably been reading for six months.

“Gross. The show was good though?” Jacob asks, finally reeling back into the moment. He magazines to drop the magazine off his side of the bed, free from his sweaty hands and back to its previous home on the floor where he found it.

When he turns back to face Benji, Benji is suddenly three feet closer, one knee sunk into the mattress as he reaches a hand out towards Jacob. 

Jacob makes a surprised noise in the back of his throat as Benji grabs him by the nape of the neck and pulls them together until they can kiss, soft and lonely and warm.

“The show was fun,” Benji says quietly, shifting his weight back until they’re nose to nose. They’re so close that Jacob suddenly feels self conscious; Benji is looking at him too closely. For one horrifying moment, Jacob is convinced he’s going to see something he doesn’t like. Benji kisses him again, and adds, “But I missed you.”

Exhaling sharply, Jacob practically feels the nervous energy melt out of his shoulders. He leans back, body absolutely thrumming with the feeling of being this close to Benji again after so long apart. He tilts his chin up until he can look Benji in the eyes.

“You really have no idea how much I missed you,” Jacob admits.

Grinning, Benji kisses him again, pressing backwards until he can shift his weight over Jacob’s body.

“What would I do without you?” Benji asks, absolutely smitten.

They watch one another, spellbound, as Benji traces the curve of Jacob’s skull with the palm of his hand. Jacob tilts his head back into the pillow, letting Benji move incrementally closer. His gaze flickers between Benji’s eyes - the same eyes that he’s looked into a thousand times before tonight, that he could pick out in any type of lineup or group.

“Crash and burn, probably,” He replies softly.

He means it like a joke, but his voice is so quiet, so sure, that it almost sounds like a warning.


	4. blood still splashes

Looking back, it was less crash + burn, and more self destruction.

After one too many nights producing the same mediocre bullshit Benji had been dancing around for years, dating Paris Hilton (yes, The), and watching Jacob slowly but surely overshadow him, Benji did not hesitate in pressing the internal self destruct button.

Night after night Jacob sat, so angry with himself for somehow managing to eclipse the whirlwind of a person he saw when he first met Benji. Alone and on the curb outside his mother’s house, Jacob would sit quietly, tracing his fingers over the grain of his acoustic guitar.

The third Hedley album came, and then the fourth. There were sold out tours, legs that never ended, and a steadily growing mass of teenaged fans.

It was a recipe for what would become the beginning of the end for their relationship. 

As the months went on, self loathing began to thread through Jacob’s insides like cotton at the edges of a voodoo doll. It left him powerless to do anything about the way he felt, yet entirely too self aware to move on.

Benji spent the same months bruised with desperation; he signed anything that was offered to him, and poured thousands of dollars into a new studio that would correspond with his never-to-be record label. Ultimately the endorsements Benji signed ended, and the recording studio never opened.

Some things you just couldn’t change, and the trajectories of their careers fell within that column. Even though Benji worked hard in a blue collar kind of way, work couldn’t replace stage presence, and that was always something that Jacob simply had in spades.

~

The next morning, Jacob blinks himself awake.

Benji is still curled into the covers beside him. He’s sleeping like he always has, with his knees protectively tucked up against his stomach, and one arm stretched out over his eyes. Jacob has always thought that Benji slept like the world constantly wanted to wake him up, when all he wanted was five more minutes of peace.

Stretching his legs out against the mattress, Jacob tucks his face into the blankets and smells the familiar combination of laundry soap, cheap shampoo, and Benji’s cologne. 

It feels like it’s still early out. The curtains are hazy with light, but it’s overcast in that twilight morning kind of way. Cozy and familiar - god, Jacob can’t believe he’s back in Benji’s bedroom - he has spent an endless number of nights alone in Vancouver, just wishing for one more early morning like this.

Jacob rolls over onto his back, and looks up at the pale stucco ceiling. His eyes still feel bleary and tired at the edges.

Licking his lips, he exhales softly, and debates the possibility that he really is in a coma. Maybe the last two days have just been his brain’s bizarre and elaborate way of coping. He tries not to think too hard about it, just in case all of this isn’t permanent. He doesn’t want to waste precious coma moments thinking about Dave and his mother.

A few minutes later Benji moves, one arm shifting against the strip of mattress between them.

Jacob feels himself freezing up despite himself. He’s not sure what to do as he watches Benji’s hand stretch across the bed, feeling around until his fingers bump up against Jacob’s elbow. Jacob inches forward towards Benji’s touch, until Benji reaches out sleepily, and holds onto Jacob’s arm.

Heart suddenly a wild thud inside of his chest, Jacob presses closer to Benji, and watches their chests move in an odd syncopation beneath the sheets.

This version of Benji feels so calm. He looks the way Jacob always imagined he should have, during the years he spent so ripe with worry about his appearance. First it was his hair and then his age, and finally the way he had to keep letting his favorite leather belt out an extra notch.

The whole time Jacob thought he was perfect, just the way he was.

Benji was what Jacob thought of when he daydreamed about a guy. Benji with his stupid dad jokes and the way he cracked himself up, usually by himself but sometimes with Joel. The endless canvas of tattoos. Benji and his crooked demeanor, warm and friendly but fiercely protective of those he loved. 

All of a sudden Jacob is swallowing against a thick knot of memory that rises tight in his throat.

It’s stupid - it’s just that he used to be one of the few who were fiercely protected by Benji. And maybe in this life he still is, but in all of the places that matter - like at home, where Jacob allows himself to be selfish and wallow in his own puddle of self pity at having terrible skin, a weird face, and an endless parade of scars - Benji left behind an empty spot that had yet to be filled by anyone.

In reality, Benji moved on a long time ago. Jacob was left empty handed, with a house full of possessions cultivated from five years on the road but not much else.

“We’re sleeping all day,” Benji mumbles from beneath the crook of his own elbow. The soft, tired words interrupt Jacob’s thoughts, and soothe the tension in his chest. 

Swallowing, Jacob leans into Benji’s embrace and inhales as deeply as he can. His mouth pulses in a quick, tight smile against Benji’s throat.

“Are you okay?” Benji asks.

Jacob blinks compulsively. All of a sudden there are tears in his eyes and he feels like a complete idiot.

“Yeah,” He murmurs, voice rough with emotion. He closes his eyes and tucks himself further into Benji’s embrace. “Just missed you, is all.”

~

When Jacob wakes up again a few hours later, the bedside alarm clock says 11:30 AM, and Benji is no longer beside him.

“Ugh,” He grumbles, wiping the sleep out of one eye as he sits up and flips the blankets off his legs.

He’s always been a double threat while sleeping. He not only runs hot, but he kicks, too. The number of mornings he’s woken up sweaty and mostly on Benji’s side of the bed are practically immeasurable. He doesn’t know how Benji put up with him for so many years.

Feet now against the floor, Jacob yawns.

His underwear are still on the floor where he left them last night, so he slides those back on and then steals the t-shirt he finds hanging by its neck on the bedroom doorknob.

Jacob finds Benji in the kitchen, where he’s standing at the island counter eating cereal and talking on the phone.

The linoleum floor sticks to Jacob’s bare feet as he makes his way into the kitchen, sneaking past Benji and to the fridge. He cracks the door open just wide enough to snag the carton of OJ from the shelf, and then smiles at Benji as he comes to stand next to him at the counter.

Benji offers him a distracted half smile mid-chew, and switches the phone from one ear to the other.

“Listen, if we can finish two tracks this week, we’ll have a full length album,” Benji is saying into the phone. He wraps an arm around Jacob’s shoulders and pulls him into a hug. “We can record them _now_. I don’t wanna wait ‘til summer’s over, man, we’ll miss Warped Tour. Come on, let’s just finish it.”

Twisting out of Benji’s embrace, Jacob hops up onto the counter and cracks open his orange juice. This is a bizarre moment - this is watching a mediocre piece of pop punk history in the making; the after-birth of Blink 182, New Found Glory and MXPX.

“Forget about what Joel says, I’ll talk to him when he gets back. We’ll finish it this week,” Benji continues to argue. He lets his spoon drop into the empty cereal bowl sitting in front of him. “It’s two songs, right? Give us two days of studio time. Me and Joel will write the songs with Eric in the morning, the band can come in the afternoon, and we’ll record everything before the end of the day. We can have one track a day, I guarantee it.”

Jacob frowns, staying quiet as he drinks his juice.

Two songs in two days is an incredibly aggressive recording schedule, especially for an album that isn’t even going to come out until next quarter.

He continues to sit quietly, studying the label on his orange juice as he concentrates on not saying anything to Benji.

“You have my word, man,” Benji promises, finally acquiescing. He pauses to awkwardly look over his shoulder at the fridge, where a magnetized calendar is stuck crookedly to door. “Joel and I will be there at eight tomorrow morning. C’mon, I need a day to sleep. And you know how Joel is sometimes.”

Smiling despite himself, Jacob shakes his head and thinks about Joel. Joel, his lame twin jokes, and his affinity for weed and shitty rap music.

“Yeah, alright - that’s great,” Benji says, as he scribbles something onto the calendar in sharpie. “See you tomorrow.”

Sighing, Benji tucks the phone into the cradle of his neck, and finishes writing his note on the calendar. When he’s done, he tosses the sharpie back onto the counter, and then walks back through to the living room to hang the phone receiver up.

Jacob watches him quietly, still drinking his juice and thinking about Joel. He watches Benji as Benji gets distracted by the muted TV, and pauses behind the couch with a hand scratching at his bare stomach. He watches Benji as he thinks about Joel, and the complicated relationship they all share.

“They wanted to bump our recording schedule until August,” Benji announces, derailing Jacob’s train of thought as he walks back into the kitchen. Somehow Benji has hat hair and bed hair all at once; the whole thing is really making Jacob want to touch it. “But fuck that. Hey, aren’t you working today?”

His fascination with Benji’s long hair flies out the window. Jacob, working?

Today?

“I am… not sure?” He manages, aiming for nonchalance. For a moment Jacob is sure he sounds positively breezy. So breezy, in fact, that Benji arches an eyebrow in Jacob’s direction when he catches the lilt in Jacob’s voice. Jacob aims a distracting grin at Benji and adds, “Gotta call for my new schedule, totally forgot yesterday.” 

Looking less than convinced, Benji makes his way between Jacob’s knees, and steals the orange juice.

“I thought you just…” He trails off and shrugs, clearly at a loss for what it is, exactly, that Jacob does. Jacob, distracted by the box black color of Benji’s hair, runs his fingers over the crown of Benji’s head. “I thought you just turned up at construction sites and like, got into the back of a pick-up truck or something. You told Joel you’d suck a dick for fifty bucks.”

Fucking Joel, ruining all his jokes. Jacob grins despite his unease, and says, “I’m worth more than fifty bucks.”

“You’re almost out of my price range, then,” Benji laughs, pressing up onto his tip toes to kiss Jacob on the mouth.

~

Jacob spends the ten minutes Benji is in the shower searching for any kind of clue as to where he works.

With Joel’s Smiths CD piping down the hallway from the bathroom, it takes Jacob two songs to figure out the address of the construction site he works at. Halfway through Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now it dawns on him that he’s an illegal Canadian immigrant working as an under the table carpenter.

So that’s great.

Lack of green card aside, Jacob almost immediately begins to romanticize the idea of working as a carpenter. He clearly never participated in Canadian Idol, then, if he’s currently living in this dime a dozen LA apartment with Benji and Joel. The thought of no longer having the band leaves him feeling equal parts relieved and confused.

In this place - this universe - he’s got Benji, but he doesn’t have his friends. He doesn’t even have his piano.

Maybe this is some kind of devil’s dues type of thing. Benji’s absolute and unwavering attention at the cost of his own creative livelihood.

Jacob looks down at the scrap of notepaper in his hand. He found it in the back pocket of his dirty jeans; a construction company logo at the top, and a few dates and times at the bottom in his own childish printing.

So he doesn’t have his music. He can deal with that. He’s still got his hands, and that’s somewhere to start.

~

In the living room, Benji is fresh out of the shower and sitting on the couch with his acoustic guitar.

He’s playing a bunch of Third Eye Blind songs in pieces: a bridge here, an intro there. By some kind of black magic Jacob actually remembers the lyrics to the song Benji is playing right now. He’s struck by the way Benji’s fingers ghost over the acoustic’s strings; for as long as Jacob knew him, this was the only instrument Benji ever owned that didn’t end up plastered in layers of cheap band stickers.

Benji’s sitting on the floor between the sofa and coffee table, a notepad of paper open in front of him. He looks young, even from here. Knowing the amount of time lost between them makes Jacob’s stomach ache.

It takes another ten seconds for Benji to catch Jacob loitering in the doorway.

“Hey,” Benji murmurs, dreamy and warm. Jacob walks towards that smile. “What if you just stopped with all the construction stuff for a while?”

Crouching down in front of the guitar, Jacob presses a kiss to Benji’s mouth.

“Did you hear what I said?” Benji asks, softly, tugging on the front of Jacob’s shirt as he begins to pull away.

Jacob, obviously, did.

“No thanks. A couple of bucks a day is better than feeling like your kept woman,” He says, letting his fingers brush through Benji’s damp hair. Jacob suddenly feels like he’s about to grimace, so he forces a grin instead. “I appreciate it, but I don’t want to be your groupie. Not in this lifetime, anyway.”

With a curious expression on his face, Benji leans back against the base of the couch. Jacob can immediately see the dangerous expression that comes along with Benji thinking.

“Well… what about being my guitar tech, then?” He counters after a long moment, and that -

That, Jacob actually considers.

~

Joel is supposed to be home from Jeannie’s before dinner, but Benji and Jacob end up having congratulatory sex on the living room floor anyways.

The fucking has always been good. It was always the one part of their relationship that was never up for debate.

Since the first time they slept together, they’ve been good at it all. Relationship sex, I missed you sex, angry sex. Secret sex in the back of a tour bus lounge at three in the morning. By the time they separated they were even road veterans at resentful sex and straight up hate fucking.

Jacob’s favorite of them all had always been a combination of styles that culminated in pure erotic codependence.

I could never live without you sex, even though I want to kill you sex.

On the living room floor, Jacob accidentally knocks a pile of magazines off of the coffee table with his arm. He is overwhelmed. Benji kisses him deeply, he sucks sharp against the skin on Jacob’s shoulder and butts his head against the bone in Jacob’s collar. As Jacob comes, he bites at Benji’s throat and the curve of his jaw.

When they lay together, it is panting and silence.

Some people are just chemicals that are meant to be together. He and Benji have always been two people doomed to live in one another’s stratosphere - even now, he’s sure of that. They were atoms that must have been around one another during the big boom; everything leading them back to one another is just science.

Most times, Jacob feels that in his bones.

~

Breaking up with Benji was the beginning of a strange series of events in Jacob’s life.

Post-Benji, Jacob threw himself back into his songwriting. He spent more time with his band, his piano, and his friends. He hiked three hours a day and disappeared into the woods with his dog often.

Benji, on the other hand, did not.

Instead of going home to Maryland, Benji invested his time in the industry. When he wasn’t hanging out with people for Instagram likes, he spent time with Joel.

And his relationship with Joel had always been… complicated. Jacob was never interested in experiencing the full force of their twin connection, but the way Benji felt about Joel had been pretty clear from the start. Joel was always something to be protected at all costs.

Once Nicole became involved, the relationship Benji and Joel once shared became the spiderweb that Jacob found himself still walking into on occasion.

After the break-up, Jacob heard Benji was spending a lot of time with them and the kids. It was an arrangement that made sense: with the twins back in one another's orbit, it was back to life as normal. Except with kids involved, things became more complicated.

~

The next morning, Jacob wakes up happy.

In this universe he doesn’t seem to talk to his family often, or do much of anything at all, but Benji smiles at him every time they pass one another, and on days like these, that’s enough.

Here, in this quiet apartment, Jacob feels safe and warm and loved. He wonders if there’s any way for this snag in the fabric of the universe to stay unmended forever.

Then he decides to have a shower, where he manages to slip and fall on his way out.

Towel in one hand, Jacob goes down hard. 

The last thing he hears are his feet skidding against the slippery tile, and the sound of the plastic shower curtain as it rips away from the rod. Benji yells at him from the other room, but it’s too late.

There’s one sharp, final crack of his head off the side of the bath tub, and then Jacob’s body crumples to the floor.


	5. running round like animals

When Jacob blinks himself awake, he’s alone in the dark.

Disoriented, he brings one hand to the top of his head, and tries to adjust to the darkness around him. He’s moving. These are the sounds he would recognize anywhere: he’s in a moving tour bus.

It’s late, but someone is still awake and watching an action movie in the back lounge with the door open. Jacob breathes into the familiar smell of his pillow. They’re watching Men In Black. Someone else is making noise in the bathroom, too, swearing to themselves under their breath as they drop their toiletries bag into the sink.

Rolling over onto his back, Jacob presses his fingers through his hair and tries to feel around for a soft spot - something broken. Surprisingly, the skin on his scalp isn’t tender. There’s no blood, dried or otherwise.

It’s… it’s like he never brained himself on Benji’s tub in the first place. 

And as far as the state of his head is concerned, the whole morning just… never happened.

“Alright,” He murmurs into the darkness, blinking. His eyes have begun to adjust, now, and he can see the details of the inside of his bunk: a cheap fleece blanket balled into the corner of the mattress, a paper schedule with cities and dates taped to the faux wood panelled wall.

Aside from the bus, things _feel_ different here. His hair is longer, it’s curling over the tips of his ears. It feels fluffy but unwashed, brushed but generally uncared for.

It’s the same hairstyle he had back when he and Tammy were filing for divorce.

Officially frazzled, Jacob frowns down at his torso, and then pushes the sleeve of his hoodie up to the elbow. He stretches his arm out, twisting his wrist from side to side to study the arm of his bare skin. Despite the dim light of the bus interior, he sees the fresh tattoo beginning to wrap around the length of his forearm. 

It’s not done yet, but the outlines of the familiar thorn covered vines are there: inked into his skin, jet black and fresh.

Just seeing his tattoo is automatically like getting a piece of himself back. Jacob sighs in relief at the small victory.

He’s still twisting his wrist from side to side, studying the dark line work that creeps all the way up to his elbow, when he hears footsteps in the narrow hallway outside. The noise peaks his interest enough for him reach up and push the curtain’s edge back.

It isn’t Benji, but it’s the next best thing.

Joel. 

Joel stands there, deeply concentrated on pulling a duffle bag out of his bunk. Jacob watches the process as it unfolds: Joel wedges it out of the small space, balances it on the top part of his thigh, and digs around inside the main compartment one-handed.

“Hey, where are we?” Jacob asks, still fuzzy.

He wipes the sleep out of his eyes and tries to push the hair back off his forehead.

For some reason, or maybe no reason at all, Joel isn’t surprised by Jacob’s sudden presence. He finds what he’s looking for in the same moment he glances over - a hard sunglass clamshell case - and zips his bag back up before jamming it into the far corner of his bunk.

“Kentucky I think,” Joel replies, flipping the small case open. He grins, and arches one pointy eyebrow in Jacob’s direction. “You’ve been asleep for a whole state. You wanna wake and bake?”

Jacob’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. This is the Joel he loved and missed.

“You fuckin’ bet,” He answers, kicking the remainder of the curtain back with one foot.

~

Ten minutes later, the bus pulls into an otherwise empty 24 hour Applebee’s parking lot.

Jacob and Joel are already waiting in the front area, watching out the kitchen window as their bus driver parks over the equivalent of ten parking spaces, hazard signals flashing.

A few minutes later Benji wanders out of the bunk area, looking sleepy and bunk rumpled as he tries to flatten his hair out with one hand and wipe the sleep out of his eyes with the other. Jacob smiles at him, unable to stop himself.

“Benj, you eating?” Joel asks, tugging a pair of gloves on. They have skeleton bones on the fingers.

Benji makes a noise that equates to _no_ , but starts pulling his hoodie on anyways. He flips the hood up over his head and zips it all the way up to his chin, leaving just his nose and stubble showing. Billy sneaks past the three of them and cracks the door open the moment the bus driver puts the breaks on.

With the door open for the first time since Montana, it’s a sudden flood of movement: Paul follows Billy, and then Max and Nate and finally Joel.

Joel bounces his way out of the bus, feet dropping heavily against each step before he jumps down to concrete.

As Joel disappears into the inky black darkness of the parking lot, Jacob watches as Benji follows blindly - still yawning, eyes half closed, pace slower but steadier.

And, even though Jacob’s brain still feels scrambled from being tossed through various Benji-centric universes like a rag doll, he can’t help but smile at the back of Benji’s stupid head. The shape of him - the hood and his shoulders and the way his torso narrows sharply to his hips - does something to Jacob, even still.

No matter what universe they’re in and timeline they’re on, Benji will always have him.

Before Benji can get too far - he only manages to extend one foot to take a step down - Jacob reaches forward, and snags him by the crook of the elbow. When Jacob wraps his arms around Benji’s body from behind, the hug is warm and familiar and _comforting._

Benji laughs a little, caught off-guard as he dips backwards, but he lets Jacob hug him all the same. After a second he turns his head to the side, and smiles crookedly when Jacob presses a kiss to the tattoo on his neck.

He reaches up and pats the side of Jacob’s head blindly, says, “Hey.”

When Benji breaks away, Jacob takes a step back. He stands in the lingering glow of the bus interior, and watches Benji follow Joel’s path. 

Benji hops down the stairs quickly - it only takes three steps - and heads off across the shiny parking lot concrete without a glance back.

~

Joel and Jacob smoke a bowl behind Applebee’s, hiding down where they keep the fat disposal and line of big smelly industrial trash bins.

“Applebee’s, man,” Jacob sighs, inhaling sharply, laughing a little before he manages to hold his breath.

Beside him, Joel cracks up laughing, eyes glassy and stoned.

They used to do this all the fucking time, through two baptisms, one strangely memorable funeral, and three album releases between them. Benji never really got into weed, but if the situation allowed for it he’d be good for a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Benji had always been a happy companion to Jacob and Joel’s circus on wheels.

It’s strange, though. Maybe Jacob is just stoned - and he _is_ stoned - but this Joel is different than the one Jacob knew. He’s sillier, here. He doesn’t take himself as seriously.

“Thanks,” Joel smiles, a little lisp behind the S.

Jacob can’t help but smile back. This Joel makes sense with this Benji. They’re one another’s counterparts; together, the two of them are something that just makes sense.

“How’s Jeannie?” Jacob finds himself asking, curious. He can’t remember if she and Joel split for the first time before or after the second album.

Grimacing, Joel hits the bowl one last time, then coughs a little despite himself.

“It’s complicated,” Is all Joel says. Jacob wonders how much the relationships Joel has with Jeannie and Benji have changed, now that Jacob has unwittingly stumbled into this timeline.

With a sigh, Jacob laughs a little, then replies, “Yeah, I get that, man.”

~

Benji is waiting in the restaurant by the time they’re done.

He looks a little more awake than he had been on the bus - 2AM awake, at least - as he reads over his copy of the menu, coated in plastic and filth. He cracks a sleepy joke in Paul’s direction, but Jacob’s too late to hear the context or the punchline.

Without thinking, Jacob slides into the spot left for him beside Benji, and then Joel follows in after. All of a sudden Jacob’s in a Madden twin throwback sandwich again. He’s too stoned to deal with that right now.

Instead, he listens as Joel starts giggling, struggling with himself as he tries to reach for a menu that’s sitting a good three inches out of arm range.

“I’m gonna go with the pancakes. Can’t beat that,” Benji announces, grinning.

Jacob nods, realizes he’s frowning with his eyebrows, and then smiles back. He leans forward and rests his chin on Benji’s shoulder so he can read the menu too, but then he can’t stop twitching whenever he gets tickled by the hair pushed under Benji’s beanie.

Fuck. He can’t concentrate on this menu thing, there’s too much pressure. Maybe he’ll just get some pancakes, too. Can everybody tell he’s as stoned as he thinks he is?

“Hey,” Benji says, suddenly nose to ear. Jacob turns immediately, unthinking, and knocks Benji’s cheek with his own.

Benji laughs, and reaches up to adjust his hood.

“Hi,” Jacob finally replies, as a smile creeps its way across his face.

Underneath the table, Benji reaches over to hold his hand. From somewhere - maybe the kitchen, it isn’t the main eating area - a Vertical Horizon song drifts over, nothing but a soft, floating tune.

Against his ear, Benji sings along to the song softly, dipping his nose down to press against Jacob’s shoulder, lip ring cool against his skin.

“I like you, Benji,” Jacob whispers, desperately, lips bumping against Benjis temple.

Benji hums against his shoulder, and tightens his grip around Jacob’s palm.

~

The next morning is a whirlwind of familiar activity:

All the band members sign their way through a stack of glossy pictures, then the twins do a bunch of radio interviews and two hour-long acoustic sets by themselves.

After that, they sit patiently for another round of interviews with various teenager run web ‘zines.

Jacob finds himself frustratingly at the edge of the fray all day. It feels like he’s standing on the beach, letting the ocean lick at his toes instead of just jumping in.

He holds Benji’s guitar backstage before the acoustic set, he feeds dollar bills into the snack machines he finds at every radio station, and he chats with every excited teenager that brings their audio recorder in for their few minutes with Benji and Joel.

He’s nothing more than Benji’s shadow - if that - all day long, and it makes him _itch_ to be the one with the microphone in his face and the guitar in his hand.

When he looks at Billy, Paul, and Joel, he misses Dave, Chris and Tommy so bad that he feels it in his bones.

So, not knowing what else to do, Jacob stands there tuning guitars - not just Benji’s, but Billy’s too - as Max deals with Paul’s recently broken bass string. They’re hiding backstage, shoulder to shoulder, just listening to the excited murmur of the crowd on the other side of the heavy black curtain.

“You think it’ll ever get bigger than this?” Max asks offhandedly. When Jacob glances over, he sees the way Max is studying his face, waiting for an answer.

Jacob tests the weight of Benji’s newest guitar in his hands, and thinks about the way Max used to look at him when he and Benji first started dating. That calculated, sour emptiness that was palpable as dirt as he scowled in Benji’s general direction.

Eventually Max just faded out, like all of them, those people who surrounded the band in their earliest, most popular days.

Will Good Charlotte ever get bigger than this? The opener for a radio sponsored show, a small meet and greet full of girls with pink dyed hair and black makeup smudged down their faces…

Jacob smiles.

“I don’t think this is where it ends, if that’s what you’re asking,” He replies, cautiously, as his fingers ghost across the strings of a guitar that isn’t his.

~

Before Jacob, Benji dated Tony, Max, Rin, and of all people, Tila Tequila.

From what Jacob has been able to piece together through various stoned conversations with Joel and Paul, and drunk conversations with Max, Sarah, and Benji himself, Benji’s relationships had all been incredibly different from one another.

The only similarity being they all ended equally badly.

Thank god for Rin, the relatively normal girl from Japan that Benji dated just before he met Jacob in Toronto the following year. Without her, Jacob is still reasonably confident Benji would have been fundamentally damaged.

And, yeah. Joel had been in there somewhere, too, in-between Jeannie but before Nicole, during that first initial stretch of success. They were one another’s safety blanket in a brand new universe of record sale statistics, late night television appearances, and long form magazine interviews.

That was the only piece of Benji Jacob had never been interested in knowing much about: the part of him that belonged to Joel, and Joel alone.

It wasn’t for Jacob to know.

When Jacob met Benji, everything changed.

Jacob remembers it perfectly. It was like flipping the page in a book - one second he was looking at a page without Benji on it, and then there he was, and there was no way to go back without ripping paper away from spine.

They kept in touch without meaning to for weeks, thousands of BBMs and emails exchanged in the dead of the night, from opposite coasts and differing countries. Over the course of two short weeks they bumped into one another at a string of radio events in Toronto and New York, passing through the same cities in different directions.

It wasn’t until they both ended up recording in LA that they managed to reconnect physically, after a stilted first phone call from Benji that lead to coffee and dinner and having a few drinks at the bar.

He and Benji talked about everything at first. There was the simple stuff, like growing up on different coasts and in different countries. Then there was fun stuff, like the best punk records and what it was like to be from Irish and Italian families (drunk and fat).

When prompted, Benji would ramble at length about boxing and fighting and MMA, all of it a long list of things Jacob was steadfastly not interested in unless they were things that Benji was talking about.

It snowballed after that. Entire months went by quickly. Soon Jacob was spending his week off in-between Canadian tours in LA; soon Benji was flying to Vancouver whenever he could swing it, each of them trailing along on the other’s tour like a piece of checked luggage.

Jacob went on tour with Good Charlotte once, only because when they first started dating Hedley was hardly booking hotel rooms. When they were in the states Benji would have to buy him booze, because Jacob wasn’t old enough to buy himself drinks at the bar.

That was when it had been good. Really good.

The first year they were together, Good Charlotte was still booking TV gigs in the states, still blowing through gold record certifications even though the overall pace had slowed down since their peak albums. Jacob spent a lot of his time getting a foot in the door, living the life of a struggling musician in Vancouver while he trailed along behind Benji in LA, awake in a cloud of DCMA t-shirts and brass knuckle shaped jewelry.

It had been a weird time for the both of them, but that’s what made it magical. It was the smell in the air after a rainstorm, the electric charge that always followed thunder. It was the feeling of falling in love.

Jacob had been coming in from the starting line while Benji was sliding back from finish. They’d managed to meet one another in the middle.

And that one perfect moment lasted for about a year. Right up until Joel met Nicole, and the fourth album bombed.

~

Benji is covered in sweat and a significant of black makeup after the show.

On the other side of the curtain, the crowd is still going insane. Panting and out of breath, Benji yanks his guitar up over his head and hands it off to Jacob without looking. He tries to wipe his face off with the sleeve of his hoodie, but it doesn’t matter. The air is so muggy it’s practically wet.

It’s the direct result of more kids showing up than anyone anticipated - band and promoter included.

They ran out of merch and copies of the first album before the show was even half over. One kid showed off a GC tattoo he got in the same spot as Benji’s, and another managed to sneak backstage long enough to let out one shriek before being escorted back to the crowd by the venue’s lacking security.

Jacob’s not sure who screamed louder upon surprised arrival, him or the kid.

So, after all of that - the insane thrum of the audience and the reverb still echoing through the air - backstage is practically rumbling with energy as everyone gets off stage.

The band and their skeleton crew works on getting instruments put away, prepped to be loaded into the van.

It’s a process familiar to Jacob, even though it - admittedly - feels wrong here.

This universe that has him with Benji is great. It’s fantastic, even. But it’s also backwards, in a looking-into-the-mirror kind of way. All of the ingredients are here, and it’s familiar and warm and Jacob can even _see_ parts of himself in the cracked glass, but…

That doesn’t make it right.

“Hey,” Benji says, coming out of nowhere and interrupting Jacob’s downward spiral. Jacob jerks a smile across his face, and looks up from the guitar he’s been dicking around on; Benji’s got an open Red Bull in one hand, and a fist full of potato chips in the other. “What’d you think? Like, I wasn’t sure about the second part. I think I screwed up a few times.”

He did. Honestly, Benji should have stuck with the whole Kid Vicious thing for a while longer, cause it was a shoe that fit at first.

“Liked it? I loved it,” Jacob scoffs. He means it. Benji could fuck up a thousand times and he’d still watch. He smiles and tugs the guitar strap up over his head. “I’m obsessed with it. I want to tattoo it on my back.”

Benji rolls his eyes and looks embarrassed for himself, even though he looks a little pleased, too.

He leverages half the potato chips from his hand into his mouth. He’s still flushed, long hair slicked back off his face, hat recently discarded in the other room, along with his hoodie and bandana.

“Dick,” He grins, and then loses one of his potato chips at the very last moment. It breaks away from his mouth and tumbles down the front of his very sweaty t-shirt.

They both watch as it lands on the floor, perfectly distanced between them.

“Dare you to eat it!” Jacob laughs, as Benji moves forward to kick it out of the way.

Benji doesn’t quite get the velocity he needs, and just ends up smashing it against the ground as Jacob drops down to his knees, laughing as he half crawls and half falls in the direction of the chip. With one hand still wrapped around the neck of Benji’s guitar, Jacob’s balance is slightly compromised and he finds himself tipping forward, grabbing onto Benji’s thigh to steady himself.

Something about it - the combination of Jacob trying to eat the chip but eating shit and almost getting kicked in the face instead - tickles Benji the right way. He starts laughing, which makes Jacob laugh, and then he inhales a piece of chewed up potato chip. It goes down the wrong way so Benji starts coughing and choking, which for some reason makes them both laugh even harder.

“Arms up, buddy,” Paul advises in passing, looking amused as Jacob finally has to drop back to fully sit on the disgusting backstage floor. He’s pointing at Benji with one hand and holding his stomach, weak from laughter, with the other, cackling with amusement as Paul looks at them both strangely. “You two are perfect weirdos, you know that?”

Jacob beams up at Paul.

It’s only a passing moment - Paul is already moving onto the snack table - but his amused approval means a lot to Jacob, in this lifetime or any other.

~

The rest of the week is a lot of the same thing.

They play shows in Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before unceremoniously rolling into a righteously rainy New York.

That’s where the whole donkey show checks into a hotel in Times Square, handpicked only for its proximity to MTV Studios. Jacob ends up with Benji and Joel in one room, which is nothing new. Paul, Billy and Nate are in the room next door, and then the tour managers and Max score the corner suite at the end of the hallway.

Today’s big city detour is so Benji and Joel can shoot a pilot for a new rock themed show on MTV. Jacob finds himself spending most of the two days in the hotel, alternating between watching weird American cable TV shows and staring out at TImes Square, ripe with weirdos.

Halfway through the second day, Jacob realizes he has no idea where Billy and Paul have disappeared to.

They seem to have their own quiet friendship that revolves around eating at hole in the wall restaurants, and sniffing out the last standing vinyl stores in each new city.

Even though Jacob sees pieces of himself in everyone, he and Nate end up forming a strange kinship, the two odd men out in a sea of otherwise permanent employees. They eat lunch together the second day Benji and Joel are shooting at MTV - Jacob orders lasagne because he misses his mom’s cooking, and Nate asks for his chicken breasts extra crispy because that’s the only way his grandmother makes it.

It’s a good couple of days, no doubt about that, but Jacob just can’t shake the feeling in his chest.

If anything, it’s settled even deeper. He doesn’t know what to think about that.

~

Tony comes to the second album release party two weeks later, which is weird.

Young Tony is somehow even worse than Jacob remembers him being. His hair is bright green, and he spends the entire night shirtless, one tattooed arm slung around Benji’s shoulders as he clutches drink after drink like a lifeline to his chest.

This Tony still has a personality in tact, which is shocking to Jacob. He hasn’t yet become one of Benji’s strange LA promo men, loud and abrasive and no more than an empty mouthpiece. He and Jacob actually get along great at first - which is weird.

The two of them manage to plow through a few shots of JD and an undetermined amount of beer before Tony tries to kiss him.

“Hey man, come on,” Jacob says, pressing Tony back by the chest, his bare skin sticky with sweat and spilled drinks.

Tony comes back at him, a drunken lean, eyes glazed and shockingly blue. “Benji’s my friend, man. It’s cool.”

“Alright,” Jacob manages, a little drunk himself. He pushes Tony back again. “I get that, but you’re being a fucking tool.”

In one second Tony goes from bleary-eyed wasted and trying to cop a feel, to blackout righteous at being told ‘no.’ His eyebrows arch halfway up his forehead, and his mouth turns down into a miserable grimace.

“You’re a fucking fag,” Tony snaps, voice sharp and dismissive. He shoves his beer bottle in Jacob’s face like it’s a weapon, holds it tight by the neck.

Drunk and not having it, Jacob scowls and pushes the bottle out of his face. He replies, “I’m in similar company then, dick bag.”

“You’re going fucking down,” Tony snaps, and then Jacob is being shoved backwards.

Tony manages to knock him back against the bar, and then they both fall backwards over one of the bar stools pushed underneath the heavy lip of the counter.

The circle of people that, only a moment ago were just milling around, begin to move away. Murmurs of a fight breaking out rumbles through the crowd as Jacob presses himself back up off the bar stool’s edge.

Tony’s eyes are hazy, clearly wasted as he holds both fists up in front of his face like a cartoon character.

“You really, _really_ don’t want to do this,” Jacob manages, holding one hand out in front of himself as he tilts back on his feet, the earlier shots of Jack coming back around to kick him swiftly in the ass.

Probably a bad choice of words, Jacob thinks blearily, as Tony’s expression sharpens with a razor’s edge. He laughs once, abrupt, managing to look fully deranged, and then his fist is flying in the general direction of Jacob’s face.

The last thing Jacob manages to clock is the look of Tony’s hand flying towards him, pale and narrow and covered in tattoo ink, before it slams into the side of his jaw, catching his ear in the process.

Jacob swears and charges forward. Tony fights like a fucking girl - Jacob can’t believe he went on to kill a man - so they end up wrestling in front of the bar, both scrambling for footing against the sticky black floor. 

It only takes a minute for Jacob to get the upper hand, torso wrapped over Tony’s back as he pushes him down to the ground with his arms locked around Tony’s waist. The crowd around them has grown, entertained and watching the spectacle - it takes about a minute before Joel is there, and then Benji like his shadow.

“Holy fuck!” Joel shouts, but it sounds like he’s actually laughing as Benji goes for Jacob, trying to pull him off.

Tony comes up swinging, of course, because he’s a fucking idiot, and manages to catch Benji in the mouth in an attempt to get one last swing in at Jacob’s face. Benji lets go of Jacob instantly and shoves him behind, wiping his mouth with one hand as he jams the heel of the other into Tony’s shoulder.

“Knock it the _fuck_ out,” Benji snaps. He leans in close, unafraid of the odd color of Tony’s eyes and the detached, drunken expression on his face.

Behind them, Jacob cringes and touches his cheekbone. Tony definitely got him in the side of the head. Who the fuck punches somebody in the ear?

“Cool off, man, come on - it’s cool,” Joel is saying then, offering a fresh beer to Tony as Benji turns back around towards Jacob. 

Benji’s bottom lip is swelling against the metal of his lip ring, but thankfully not split. Jacob’s stomach dips anyway at the hard, stony expression on Benji’s usually warm face.

And all of a sudden Jacob is scrambling to recover, feeling stupid and drunk and lost and young.

“He tried to kiss me or something, I don’t know, it was sloppy,” He explains, trying to make light of the whole situation as he reaches for Benji’s still clenched fist. Benji looks pissed off, but Jacob presses forward anyways, trying to elaborate, “When I pushed him off he called me a fag - “

The word is hardly out of his mouth before Tony comes flying back at them, right over Benji’s shoulder.

It all happens so fast, nobody has a chance to react before Tony’s fist is connecting against the side of Jacob’s head, knuckles splitting upon impact.

Jacob falls forward, slumping over Benji’s shoulder, and immediately passes out from the blunt force of Tony's punch.


	6. In cities soaked in ashes

Benji was always the better businessman.

More sure of himself than Jacob could ever dream of being when it came to things like contract clauses and tour itineraries, Benji practically woke up with dollar signs in his eyes. Jacob was always the dreamer, and Benji the work horse.

It _worked_ , more than anything else in Jacob’s life up to that point had.

Together they made up for one anothers weaknesses - at least when they had the coordination to work as a team instead of opposing forces. Benji had the life experience of always being part of a team, always a part of Joel. Jacob never got that, growing up. The closest he came to having a brother was the cousin on his dad’s side he’d spent the entire summer of 1998 with, but hadn’t seen since.

Jacob’s lack of experience in that area made walking into the weird bubble Benji and Joel created for themselves… strange. It was a new dynamic for everyone involved because up until that point, neither of the twins had ever been romantically involved with someone they were interested settling down with.

It had been a surprise to everyone when Jacob ended up changing Benji’s life.

Before Jacob, Benji and Joel’s idea of foreplay had been signing a new contract for a series of appearances at the Hard Rock Cafe.

It was Jacob who showed him that sometimes hard work couldn’t replace the feeling of fucking off with a cigarette and no place to be; Jacob, who laughed hysterically at firecrackers and dick jokes. Jacob, who loved the people close to him fiercely and without end.

Somehow, it was only Benji that seemed to be expecting it.

~

It’s the sound of Conan O’Brien’s laughter that wakes Jacob up again.

He immediately realizes that the side of his face is stuck to leather, and after that it’s a slow slide into waking up with a sharp start - especially once he realizes there are other people in the room with him.

Sitting up, Jacob wipes the drool from the corner of his mouth, and pushes himself into an upright position.

Chris is sitting across from him, propped up against the wall, head bowed as he taps away on a set of practice drum pads. He doesn’t notice Jacob staring.

Jacob blinks, and looks around.

This isn’t so unfamiliar. He immediately knows he’s in a green room - mostly because they all look the same, for starters. There’s a potted plant and a set of fake leather furniture, stone grey walls and a dark slate floor, a giant TV monitor mounted up in the corner with an entire folding table of snacks and canned drinks set up beneath it.

Canada, America or Japan, all green rooms look the same.

The soles of Jacob’s chucks squeak against the leather couch as he drops his feet down to the ground. He can see Joel’s reflection in the mirror across from the couch as he wanders back and forth, singing quietly to himself. He’s dressed like a priest without the collar: black button up, black slacks.

Rubbing his face, Jacob casts a weary glance up at the TV screen mounted in the corner.

The volume is low, but audible. Conan’s big ginger head is there, orange hair bouncing against the blue set as he talks to Jimmy Fallon. They’re both laughing maniacally at their own jokes and fighting for the pause in-between one another’s breaths.

“Does this make me look weird?” Benji asks, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

He’s fidgeting with his tie. Across the room, Joel picks up on the question, and stops singing scales long enough to crack, “Your _face_ makes you look weird.”

“You guys have the same face,” Billy says to nobody in particular. He seems more interested in the pad of paper he’s using to sketch on, the Dexter of gory cartoons.

Joel, never one to give up on one of his own jokes, rolls his eyes at Billy, laughs, and then goes back to his vocal warm up. He claps his hands intermittently as he wanders back and forth along the length of the room, side stepping Chris when Chris bounces up from his drum kit for a fresh bottle of water.

Back on the couch, Jacob turns his attention towards Benji’s outfit. It’s standard Benji attire, mostly. Well, kind of. The tie might be a little much.

“You look great. You’re my little peanut,” Jacob says, smiling.

Benji doesn’t buy it. Instead he fidgets with the tie some more, pulling at the knot, tugging and twisting until he inevitably loses his patience and yanks the whole thing up over his head.

Paul glances up from the bright screen of his laptop, and jokes, voice flat, “Benji’s trying to hang himself.”

“Ha ha,” Benji intones, nervously balling the tie up in his hands.

He’s still standing in front of Jacob, shuffling from foot to foot and looking unsure of himself even though he looks fine - honestly. He always looks fine; better than fine, even. Benji’s face betrays him, though, even now Jacob can see the strings that hold him together are starting to fray.

Frowning, Jacob reaches for the tie Benji’s still mutilating, and closes his hands around Benji’s.

“You look great,” Jacob repeats, trying to show how much he means it. He looks up at Benji’s face, and adds, “Don’t worry about the tie.”

Benji finally lets go of the offending accessory, and blurts, “I’m really nervous.”

“I know,” Jacob nods, because, well… that part is obvious.

This Benji is so unfamiliar, so new and terrified of what lays ahead. The Benji he used to know was never nervous, never new or scared of anything. In fact, the Benji Jacob left behind was about as seasoned as pop-punk veterans could get, with his withering sarcasm and crooked, self aware half smiles.

The Benji in front of him is fresh and young and battling stage fright before his appearance on a live late night talk show for the very first time.

“Listen, Joel’s not even nervous,” Jacob says, teasing. He looks into Benji’s eyes and means it. “You got this.”

Benji shuffles back and forth, toeing the ground, but finally manages to take a deep breath.

“Famous last words, huh?” He asks, but he’s smiling now.

~

Later that night, Jacob is laying on the hotel bed in his underwear.

His tattoos are changing. The outline of his sleeve is almost done, far as he can tell.

There are some areas where the roses have begun to turn red, colored ink bright against his summer tanned skin, other parts full of black thorns and leaves that wrap around his forearm from the thin, soft skin over his wrist, to the farmer tanned, beat up backs of his arms.

“Are you gonna admit I was right?” Jacob asks, grinning as he looks away from his arm and over at Benji.

Benji, on the other side of the room, clicks something on his laptop over at the built-in desk, and plays dumb through a smile.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now,” He lies.

Even back when Jacob was just a casual observer of Benji, way before they started dating and Jacob was only limited to seeing him on MuchMusic every few months, it had been very clear Benji was a charming guy. Endearing, was what Jacob’s mother called him one Christmas dinner, entertained by this man with his never ending stream of off-handed observations and making himself laugh.

Well, this is one of those real life moments where Jacob has tangible evidence of exactly how adorable Benji is.

This is proof, goddamnit, and the next time Benji tries to cop out of Jacob’s “oh you’re so cute” game, Jacob is going to reference this exact moment.

“Hey, did you feel extra small when you shook Coney’s gigantic hand?” Jacob asks, kind of joking, but kind of not. 

He grins and folds both arms behind his head.

Benji cracks up laughing, his face lit up with amusement as he looks away from his computer and over to Jacob on the bed. The corners of his eyes are all wrinkled up, the sight makes Jacob’s stomach flip happily.

“He’s huge! Everybody looks tiny compared to him. Like, I dunno… everyone,” Benji explains, matter of factly, even as he lets himself trail off at the end.

Jacob laughs, and watches as Benji goes back to whatever he was carefully typing. Benji’s sitting at the small built-in “business center” desk in the corner of the room, with his laptop plugged into the power outlet behind the TV.

Apparently the backup battery generator on the bus died when they’d been en route to New York the night before, leaving everyone with a bevy of dead, useless electronics. Nothing that Jacob remembers, of course. He’s since been advised that no one’s personal electronics had the chance to see the light of day until they rolled into NBC Studios a few hours later - and, even then, there had been a short fight before Paul secured the one unprotected power outlet in the green room for his laptop.

Band politics.

“Hey,” Jacob says, trying to snag Benji’s attention again. He wiggles his bare toes and asks, “What if we got pay per view porn? Something saucy.”

Benji’s back to his emails or AIM messages or whatever it is that he does on there for two hours every night. 

“I was thinking I could probably just fuck you in a minute instead,” Benji answers, as his eyes dance over the line he’s reading on-screen. He sounds half distracted, and immediately goes back to typing slowly with both pointer fingers stuck out.

Jacob’s toes curl so hard they cramp up. There’s the confident and overworked Benji Madden he’s missed.

“You’re quoting me on a minute?” Jacob immediately grins, pushing himself up onto his elbows. “I know you’re presumably Christian, but even you can do better than that.”

That distracts Benji successfully. He starts to crack up, like, really crack up, his mouth opened wide as he leans back and cackles. There’s really no other way to describe it, it’s just this awkward crescendo peppered with literal HA HA HAs.

Jacob has been obsessed with making that noise come out of Benji since the first moment he heard it in person.

“Well, someone told me you were Italian once,” Benji replies, because he’s the kind of guy that assumes religion and nationality are the same thing. He stretches, and then starts getting up out of his uncomfortable looking office chair. “Though I’ve never seen any evidence of that.”

That makes Jacob fall back against the mattress laughing. He throws one arm out and shouts, “Burn unit! Fuck!”

“You’re also Canadian,” Benji points out, trying his damndest to keep a straight face as approaches the edge of the bed and then leans over, palms sinking into the mattress on either side of Jacob’s hips. “But I don’t like to make fun of your disabilities.”

They’re both totally laughing before the sentence is even fully out of Benji’s mouth.

Jacob grabs Benji by the back of the neck and tugs him closer, until he can grin against the warm skin of Benji’s tattooed throat and press their chests together. Benji’s wearing a black tank top and old flannel pants, but not much else.

It makes Jacob want to curl up on top of him and die.

Benji’s palms slide down Jacob’s torso to his hips, hands familiar but not the same. The MADE MAN tattoo is there now, fresh ink, bright black and a stark contrast compared to Benji’s pale skin. Jacob smiles when he notices the lack of horseshoe on Benji’s pinky, and the missing red AMC against the curve of his palm.

With a grin, Jacob tugs Benji closer by the elastic around his waist, and pushes himself up from the mattress until they’re near enough to kiss.

Being this close to Benji is electric and familiar, like the salty smell of the ocean and the shock that follows charged static. When Jacob closes his eyes, it’s easy to remember this piece of himself that he thought he lost a long time ago.

He’s got his hands on the bare skin at the base of Benji’s spine when someone tries to open the hotel door before settling on knocking instead, once they realize that it - like every other hotel room door in existence - is locked.

The door rattles against the frame again.

Benji groans at the interruption, and presses his forehead against the muscular curve of Jacob’s shoulder. He looks frustrated for a moment, but he can’t help but laugh when there’s another, shorter knock, and then Joel’s voice, pitched and debatably giggling as he sing-songs, “Roooom service!”

“Damnit,” Benji swears under his breath. He pauses for a moment, looking into Jacob’s face, and then inevitably pushes himself up and off the bed.

Before he heads in the direction of the door, Benji grabs a pillow from the foot of the bed, and looks back at Jacob once to make sure he’s at least covered up his boner. Jacob gives him a thumbs up from underneath the blankets, so Benji makes the noise equivalent of _shut the fuck up, I’m coming_ when there’s another sharp knock.

He unceremoniously opens the room door, pillow held carefully in front of his junk.

“Oh god, you were fucking,” Is the first thing Jacob hears Joel say.

Jacob grins despite himself, and calls, “Not yet!”

He’s trying to be helpful.

“Ew.” Joel sounds baked as fucked. Maybe a little tipsy. Maybe Benji will let Jacob go and get a little stoned and tipsy, too, and then fuck him proper once everyone else has gone to sleep. “Some girl offered to give me a blowjob in the lobby. That’s good, right?”

Now Benji makes a grossed out noise as he takes a step back from the door to let Joel follow him inside.

“Hey, whatever - don’t let this one get you down,” Jacob defends, raising his eyebrows. He pushes himself back up onto his elbows as Joel approaches the foot of the bed. “Blowjobs are always good.”

Joel offers him a thoughtful smile and then nods, wandering through the remainder of the room until he reaches the far wall. There, one medium sized window showcases the upper middle class side of the burrough they’re staying in; Joel looks through it pensively.

“Are you okay?” Benji asks, scratching behind his ear with the hand not holding the pillow.

Shrugging his shoulders, Joel sighs, “I’m pretty sure Jeannie just broke up with me,” and then there’s a brief pause before, “She said she wants to keep the dog.”

Fuck. Jacob’s eyes almost roll out of his head. In reality he never got the opportunity to meet Jeannie in the flesh, but over the years he’s heard many tales of her crazy drunk Asian exploits. They were usually triggered by seeing Jeannie on TV while aimlessly channel surfing.

Benji seemed to hold a special kind of contempt for her, but Jacob always figured that was just because she’d been the first girl to really destroy and stomp all over Joel’s heart. In doing so, she probably deserved it - and even if she didn’t, Benji held a grudge like an old Italian grandmother, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyways.

“Are you kidding?!” Benji is immediately in bitch mode. Jacob shifts uncomfortably, and wonders if he can stretch his leg far enough to reach the jeans and t-shirt he stripped out of before climbing onto the bed.

Frowning, Joel leaves the window and plops down into the office chair Benji was sitting in before.

Jacob inconspicuously begins to inch towards his abandoned clothing.

“ _Yeah_ , serious,” Joel answers, sounding vaguely offended that Benji has dared confirm this with him. “I got really fucking stoned. I didn’t mean to, but it happened. Benj.”

Tossing the pillow back to the bed, finally unnecessary, Benji sighs, “Yeah.”

“Ugh, Benj,” Joel settles for saying, dropping his head into his hands. Jacob is halfway back to his clothes when he realizes that Joel is actually about to start crying.

Executive decision made, Jacob hops out of bed, grabs his clothes off the floor, and slips around the corner and into the bathroom. The lights inside are sharp and blinding, but they do nothing to block the low murmur of Benji continuing he and Joel’s conversation in the other room.

Fucking Jeannie, Jacob grumbles to himself, jamming one leg into his pants, and then the other.

~

Joel sleeps in their hotel room that night, curled up in an arm chair beside the window.

“You sure you don’t wanna get in on this?” Jacob grins, motioning to the three inches of space left in the double bed he and Benji are occupying. “We can Godfather style it.”

To illustrate his point, Jacob stretches one arm up behind Benji’s head, and rests the other over the small open space beside him. It makes Joel laugh, which is what Jacob was going for, so he considers his contribution to the night a rousing success.

Joel’s smile fades as he settles further back into the chair, a blanket from the bed wrapped around him, hood pulled low over his forehead.

“If you two are done flirting I’m gonna go ahead and turn the light out,” Benji yawns.

That gets another giggle out of Joel - and maybe that’s just a lingering reaction to being stoned, but it’s still better than tears. Jacob’s looking over at him when Benji clicks the side light off, and the room floods with darkness.

“Lay down better,” Benji commands softly, tugging at Jacob’s waist.

Laughing, Jacob twists himself around and murmurs, “You’re bossy.”

“You like it,” Benji counters, as Jacob octopus wraps both his arms and legs around Benji’s body and presses his face into the warm hollow of Benji’s throat.

The skin there is soft and familiar, Benji’s stubble scratching his forehead as he nuzzles closer.

“I do like it,” Jacob murmurs, blinking into the darkness. He feels his eyelashes brush Benji’s skin. “I like you.”

Benji’s still ebbing with laughter - once he gets started sometimes it’s impossible for him to stop - and that just makes Jacob smile even more. He pats Benji’s stomach, slides his arm around Benji’s waist and touches the small of his back and the space between his shoulder blades and all the places Jacob’s only ever been allowed to exist near because they loved one another.

All of a sudden there are tears in the corners of Jacob’s eyes, stupid and emotional as he thinks about all the nights like this that he foolishly thought he could keep forever.

“You’re okay I guess,” Benji sighs, voice sleepy. He can’t even wait a full minute before he’s smiling and admitting, “Just kidding, I love you.”

There’s a cough from over in the corner of the room before Joel says, voice nasally, “ _Guys_.”

“ _I_ love you Joel, don’t worry,” Jacob says, turning to look back over his shoulder. When he sees Joel peering back at him through the dim light of the room, he stretches one arm out and extends his pinky in Joel’s direction.

Joel laughs and shakes his head, tugging the blanket closer to his chin. “You guys are fucked.”

“We could be a tripod,” Jacob says, a joke that doesn’t go over in mixed company but does surprisingly well when presented to two brothers who used to bone each other on the reg. It cracks Benji up, making him HA HA HA laugh enough that the bed starts to shake. “Joely, don’t shut me down here.”

By twin osmosis Joel starts cracking up too, shaking his head and looking at Jacob with fond eyes.

Jacob doesn’t think Joel has any idea what that means to him.

In reality, the last time Jacob saw Joel, Joel was screaming at him, swearing and throwing shit at the front of his rental car.

That hadn’t been a great day.

~

When Jacob wakes up the next morning, Benji and Joel are already gone.

It’s still early, but the sun is out. Someone’s opened the curtains for him, let the sunlight stream through the gauzy panels. The crack in the curtains allows yellow light to pour over the cream colored carpet, and Jacob feels himself fixating on it for some reason, stuck on the way the light hits the carpet fibers just so.

After a few minutes he shakes himself out of it, stretches, and blinks until he’s a little more awake.

It does occur to him that this is the kind of thing he never got to appreciate when he was the one fronting it all. Hedley had been to more cities, provinces and states than he could probably count to, but even now he wouldn’t be able to make a list of the sights he saw if he tried.

This thing where he follows Benji around the country is different. What started as a guitar tech gig meant as a ruse to keep his name off the books of some illegal Mexican landscaping company has completely transformed over the last year Good Charlotte has become popular.

And they are _popular_. Like, primetime TV, Rolling Stone Magazine cover popular.

The thing is, in this new world that revolves around album sales and PR debriefings, Jacob has begun to feel like just another piece of the equipment.

Which is fine. He’s… kind of into that, honestly. But he’s also begun to realize something. With every day that passes inside this odd universe where Benji seems happy just to have Jacob around, Jacob finds himself longing more and more for his own band. His own guitar. His own tour, his own crew.

That kind of thing.

Jacob also misses his piano fiercely. And that’s the moment he realizes it: as he sits at the edge of a hotel bed, waking up and aimlessly staring at the unprogrammed red digital numbers that flash at him from an alarm clock haphazardly bolted to the top of the TV.

“Fuck,” He sighs to himself, holding his head in his hands.

Fuck fuck fuck.

He takes a minute, and then pushes himself up. He throws his legs off the side of the bed.

Jacob considers his options. They’re pretty limited, and mostly contained to the continental breakfast being served until ten downstairs. 

~

Chris is fucking weird.

He gets to the breakfast buffet at the same time Jacob does, so they end up eating together. Chris always reminded Jacob a lot of himself, except without the sense of preservation Jacob’s pretty sure he only possesses because he’s Canadian.

Jacob is also pretty sure the fact that Chris is one of Bert McCracken’s closest friends says more about him than it doesn’t.

They trade war stories over food - mostly tales of the dumb things they’ve done while drunk and wasted - and Jacob finds himself laughing helplessly as he snaps his bacon in half and drinks a gallon of lukewarm milk in a thousand tiny servings.

Chris eats two bowls of Lucky Charms, a banana, and three pastries. Carbs help with the hangover, he maintains.

“But then, that was the night I had sex with the fat goth chick, so…” Chris finishes, eyes permanently wide, both eyebrows arched halfway up his forehead. Jacob laughs again, because he doesn’t know how else to react to Chris’ long-winded story about the one summer circuit he spent drumming in Chicago. “So I guess it wasn’t all bad, is what I’m trying to say.”

Chris makes himself laugh at that, and ends up choking on his cereal.

“Goth girls freak me out,” Jacob admits. He empties a packet of sugar onto the half a grapefruit he managed to snag from the dwindling fruit platter. As he lets Chris finish choking, he presses the sugar granules down into the flesh of the grapefruit with the back of a spoon. “Actually, most girls freak me out.”

As if on cue, a pair of squealing teenage girls pass by their table.

Both girls are wearing Benji makeup all down their cheeks, and black clothes that are in varying shades of wear from too many washes. Neither of them seem to realize that Chris is the drummer for their favorite band, or that Jacob is fucking one of its members on the DL.

“Word, bro,” Chris nods, reaching across the table to fistbump in solidarity.

~

He and Chris are finishing up their last coffee refills when the twins walk into the room in step, dressed in matching MADE hoodies, dark pants, bandanas, and snapback hats.

“My little salt and pepper shakers,” Jacob says as they approach the table. Smiling, Benji bends down to hug Jacob from behind, then reaches over his shoulder to steal a leftover half a piece of toast. Joel ducks past Benji, elbows up in the air as he adjusts his bandana and hat brim.

It’s everything Jacob has ever wanted, having Benji this close again.

“Breakfast is good for another hour,” Chris tells Joel, leaning back in his seat. He stretches his arms out and over his head, hoodie inching up his stomach.

Joel nods and sits down next to Chris with a yawn, then sets his ancient cellphone screen up on the table.

“We were reminiscing about getting into trouble,” Jacob explains, looking back at Benji, half draped across his back and chewing too closely to his ear. He bounces his shoulder until Benji finally relents and drops into the seat beside him. “This is going to come as a surprise to you, but I think Chris beat me.”

Grinning, Chris pumps his arm up into the air, fist bouncing up and down, and laughs as Joel gets back up to snag breakfast before it disappears. As Joel leaves, he cups Chris’ hand as he passes by like he’s scared Chris is going to fist bump him in the face.

Benji laughs too, scrounging the tail end of Jacob’s coffee before getting back up from the table as well. He pats Chris on the shoulder and follows Joel over to the buffet line.

It’s impossible not to smile at them from across the room. Jacob watches as they consult with one another over the various platters of food. Joel points out the fruit platter before handing Benji a fresh pastry, and then reaching for one himself.

“Does it ever feel like you’re fucking both of them?” Chris asks, both arms still folded up awkwardly behind his head. He raises his eyebrows and admits, “I’ve never had sex with a twin. It’s gotta be weird. It’s weird being in a band with them.”

Laughing, Jacob shrugs. 

“Benji wouldn’t be Benji without Joel,” He explains, which doesn’t really explain anything at all.

Chris sighs and admits, “The twin osmosis thing is weird. I thought they were fucking… playing a trick on me at first. That shit is _organic_.”

“It’s witchcraft,” Jacob agrees, reaching for his coffee before he remembers Benji drank the last of it.

It’s only a few minutes later that the twins come back to the table.

Jacob watches Benji hover at the edge of the table as he sets his orange down, and then his coffee, and then his actual breakfast plate.

“I forgot a fork,” Benji says to nobody in particular, cutting himself off when Joel appears and offers him one across the table.

That makes both Chris and Jacob crack up laughing; Benji and Joel look at one another, and then the two of them.

“I thought Jacob was retarded, but he’s actually just Canadian,” Joel says, mouth lilting up into a lazy half smile as he gestures in Jacob’s direction and reaches for the coffee creamer. “So what’s your excuse, buddy?”

Both Benji and Jacob start laughing at that; each a big fan of Joel’s strange Joel jokes.

“I drink too much,” Chris grins, a level expression on his face. “Where were you guys, anyway?”

Biting into his croissant with one hand, Benji stirs sugar into his coffee with the other and answers, “MTV.”

“Ah, the devil’s crossroads,” Chris sighs, watching as Benji methodically gets to work on his plate.

Benji picks up a piece of bacon and shrugs, “It wasn’t so bad. We did two commercials, and they want us to play live on New Year's Eve.”

Nodding, Chris begins to tap on the table top, a rhythmic pattern as the twins settle into their meals and Jacob is left to fidget and rock back on the rear two legs of his chair.

After a momentary silence, Chris nods at Joel and asks, “What you working with, Joely?”

“Eggs,” Joel answers immediately, using his fork to point at the associated spoon full of scrambled eggs taking up about a quarter of his plate’s real estate. “Sausage,” He points to that pile, too. “Fruit cup.”

Benji giggles with a mouth full of food, which makes Joel look up curiously.

“What?” Chris asks, even though he’s already invested with a grin and a raised eyebrow.

It takes Benji a minute to chew and swallow, but when he does, he says, “Fruit cup.”

“Jesus,” Joel sighs, trying to sound put out, but he can’t hold back his smile and laugh.

~

It turns out that the only difference between a Hedley and Good Charlotte tour is the amount of drinking involved.

Good Charlotte tour like a group of retirees - which the exception of Chris, who goes out to the closest bar or pub every night he can swing it. Chris’ extracurricular activities are still nothing in comparison to any of Hedley’s first five or six tours, an era where Jacob and Chris prided themselves on leaving upper deckers in every hotel bathroom across the Rockies.

Benji and Joel treat their band like a franchise. They run it like it’s a small business and nothing more. Which is fine - it just isn’t what Jacob is used to. He aches when he sees the potential for fire shots and naked car washes pass everyone by.

Give Jacob two sticks to rub together, and he’d figure out a way to include a naked car wash.

“This tour is going to last forever,” He groans at Benji one night, sitting on the merch table while the venue is empty and all the kids are still lining up outside. On stage, Max is thumbing the bridge to a Vertical Horizon song using one of Billy’s guitars.

Benji levels a grin at him, and kisses Jacob on the mouth as he passes by.

“Nothing lasts forever,” He says, as though everything is simple as that.

The sentiment - simple as it is - wedges itself into Jacob’s stomach. He finds that it lingers there through the remainder of the night, a swift reminder as he watches Benji bounce around on stage, holding the neck of his guitar and throwing half empty water bottles into the crowd.

Nothing lasts forever, he thinks to himself again, hiding in the shadows by the bar.

Everything is meant to break.

~

Paul, Billy, Benji and Joel hang around outside of the tour bus that night after the show.

They’re signing autographs for anyone who asks for one, and taking selfies with disposable cameras.

It makes Jacob think: one of the most underrated aspects of being a man on tour is the ability to simply pass as a member of the crew. This little tidbit makes going from the venue to bus and back again one of the simplest parts of Jacob’s day - compared to, say, Billy’s girlfriend, who gets screamed at by fans every time they so much as get a glimpse of her profile.

Either way the coin falls for her, it’s safe to say Linzi is on the losing side of the bet.

Considering this, Jacob takes the opportunity to head into the bus by himself.

Benji was right earlier: nothing is forever, and Jacob doesn’t know why he was ever stupid enough to think that this could be sustainable. It’s a house built of cards and nothing more; the next time Jacob bumps his head getting out of a bunk, there’s a good chance he’ll spin into the next universe that continues to give him Benji and nothing else.

So fuck that. He’s not leaving it to chance this time. If this can’t be forever, then he isn’t interested.

With his mind made up, Jacob lets the bus door swing closed behind himself, and heads immediately to the back lounge area. There’s one thing that _has_ been consistent the whole time he’s been travelling through uncanny valley.

Sitting down on the edge of the lounge couch, Jacob braces one palm on either side of the coffee table, and takes a deep, steady exhale. Out of all the stupid things he’s ever done to himself, this one probably actually ranks quite low down on the list.

With this in mind, Jacob smiles to himself, forcing confidence, takes another short breath, and launches forward.

He hits his head off the edge of the table, and knocks himself out cold on the first try.

And his mother always thought he didn’t set his goals high enough.


End file.
